“My point here is simply that, even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn't one any more.”

—  Robert M. Price

Opening Statement by Robert Price http://infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/price-rankin/price1.html <br class="br">[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, The Price-Rankin Debate: Jesus: Fact or Fiction?, http://infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/price-rankin/, infidels.org, 27 November 2016, 1997]

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Robert M. Price17
American theologian 1954

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“I find myself more and more attracted to the theory, once vigorously debated by scholars, now smothered by tacit consent, that there was no historical Jesus lying behind the stained glass of the gospel mythology.”

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Christ a Fiction, https://infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/fiction.html, 27 November 2016, 1997]

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“This dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of His existence. That the historic Jesus is something different from the Jesus Christ of the doctrine of the Two Natures seems to us now self-evident. We can, at the present day, scarcely imagine the long agony in which the historical view of the life of Jesus came to birth. And even when He was once more recalled to life. He was still, like Lazarus of old, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes — the grave-clothes of the dogma of the Dual Nature.”

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Context: The name Jesus defines an historical occurence and marks the point where the unknown world cuts the known world... as Christ Jesus is the plane which lies beyond our comprehension. The plane which is known to us, He intersects vertically, from above. Within history Jesus as the Christ can be understood only as Problem or Myth. As the Christ He brings the world of the Father. But we who stand in this concrete world know nothing, and are incapable of knowing anything, of that other world. The Resurrection from the dead is, however, the transformation: the establishing or declaration of that point from above, and the corresponding discerning of it below. <!-- p. 29

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Robert M. Price photo

“In the case of Jesus Christ, where virtually every detail of the story fits the mythic hero archetype, with nothing left over, no "secular," biographical data, so to speak, it becomes arbitrary to assert that there must have been a historical figure lying back of the myth.”

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Christ a Fiction, https://infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/fiction.html, 27 November 2016, 1997]

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“Generations of Rationalists and freethinkers have held that Jesus Christ corresponds to no historical character: There never was a Jesus of Nazareth. We might call this categorical denial “Jesus atheism.” What I am describing is something different, a “Jesus agnosticism.” There may have been a Jesus on earth in the past, but the state of the evidence is so ambiguous that we can never be sure what this figure was like or, indeed, whether there was such a person.”

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“Jesus was not a social reformer of the modern type… he approached these facts purely from the moral, and not from the economic or historical point of view.”

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“The name Jesus defines an historical occurence and marks the point where the unknown world cuts the known world... as Christ Jesus is the plane which lies beyond our comprehension. The plane which is known to us, He intersects vertically, from above. Within history Jesus as the Christ can be understood only as Problem or Myth. As the Christ He brings the world of the Father. But we who stand in this concrete world know nothing, and are incapable of knowing anything, of that other world. The Resurrection from the dead is, however, the transformation: the establishing or declaration of that point from above, and the corresponding discerning of it below.”

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“Though he [Charles Guignebert] could not accept either the Christ myth theory, which held that no historical Jesus existed, or the Dutch Radical denial that Paul authored any of the epistles, Guignebert took both quite seriously.”

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Tom Flynn, Richard Dawkins, The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, https://books.google.com/books?id=fsZ26vQxJKMC&pg=PA372, 2007, Prometheus Books, Publishers, 978-1-61592-280-2, 372, Guignebert, Charles]

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